I’ve been writing variations of the same screenplay for the past 13 years; there have been many scenes that have come and gone, or have been reworked during that time.
At every stopgap, there is always a scene where the boys are cruising in a runaway golf cart where they shouldn’t be. And I happily blame Peter and Bobby Farrelly's 2011 film “Hall Pass” for this champagne problem.
The general public does not consider the raunchy R-rated studio comedy one of the bona fide classics in the brotherly moviemaking duo’s shared filmography, which also includes “Dumb and Dumber” and “There’s Something About Mary.” However, my friends and I sure do.
It stars an alternatively hairstyled Owen Wilson and peak-SNL Jason Sudeikis as man-children who inflate their past “game” with the opposite sex to cope with the lack of action their wives, Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate, have been giving them lately.
This pair of disenchanted dimwits quickly becomes lost in the sauce when their ladies reward them with a rare shot at permitted infidelity.
Those who haven’t seen the film could probably predict where the story heads, but they could never understand the path the creative crew took to get there. It can never be overstated.
My only knock on one of my favorite films—including the possessor of my No. 1 slot for 2011, just ahead of “Moneyball”—is that we don’t get more of Wilson and Sudeikis with their fellow midlife-crisis-having members of their suburbia-fevered entourage along for the vicarious ride.
Their collective of foul-mouthed, equally polo-shirted, and whipped cronies consists of “Curb’s” J.B. Smoove, “The Office” co-creator Stephen Merchant, and Larry Joe Campbell as the somehow-not-Alan-from-“The Hangover” iconic Hoghead.
What we do get before we say c’est la vie to the friend group far too soon in the film’s runtime is the boys cruising for babes at Applebee’s and cartoonishly evading the silly police while hyperventilating within a golf cart they may or may not have misplaced — for reasons that escape me — mere moments earlier.
Further hijinks ensue as they take it out onto Main Street of the New England town in which the film is set. Comedy—nay, cinema—at its finest.
While I implore everyone to watch the slept-on Thanksgiving movie “Tower Heist” (No. 3 on my 2011 list) on Netflix this week, I also fondly recognize that I can’t see a golf cart, go on a bachelor party, or even simply riff with my buddies without thinking about the friend group in “Hall Pass.”
What a triumph.